AppScale + AppInventor

AppScale provides absolute portability to AppInventor empowering AppInventors around the world who don’t have access to a quality internet. Build your Android apps with AppScale+AppInventor today!

AppScale is an open source PaaS that mirrors the Google App Engine APIs, and App Inventor is an open source app that uses the Google App Engine API’s to allow users to make Android apps with a simple drag and drop interface. Combining AppScale and App Inventor gives access to a fully functioning App Inventor private or public cloud. AppScale implements all of the APIs using open source technologies and can scale your deployment just like Google App Engine can. The only other alternative to get your own App Inventor cloud is to run the App Inventor app on the Google App Engine SDK, which is not meant for use outside of app development purposes.

Having AppScale as an alternative to Google App Engine can circumvent many of the issues with running an app on a public cloud. For example, running an app on a public cloud requires end users to have internet access in order to use the app. If a user doesn’t have internet access, they can’t use the app. If a teacher wanted to teach her students programming concepts using App Inventor and did not have internet access for all of her students, AppScale is a great alternative. The teacher could set up AppScale on a server or laptop and have the students connect to App Inventor running on AppScale on a private network.

Running App Inventor on AppScale is easy. Following these instructions, you can deploy your own private App Inventor:

Once you have AppScale running, use this command to copy the sample apps repository where App Inventor is located:

git clone https://github.com/AppScale/sample-apps.git

Using the AppScale tools, or the web interface, deploy the app located in sample-apps/java/appinventor2. You can do this with the tools by running appscale deploy sample-apps/java/appinventor2. Or zip up the appinventor2 directory and upload it through your AppScale deployment’s web interface.

Follow the instructions in the AppInventor2 directory in the README file to get the App Inventor build server running. This allows you to package your projects into .apk files.

After deploying the app, follow the link given to you by AppScale to reach your app.